{"id":19422,"date":"2010-06-21T22:38:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-22T02:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.firstthings.com\/blogs\/theanchoress\/?p=19422"},"modified":"2017-03-10T16:09:16","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T16:09:16","slug":"beautiful-sad-and-all-too-true","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theanchoress\/2010\/06\/21\/beautiful-sad-and-all-too-true\/","title":{"rendered":"Beautiful & Sad and all too true"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Joseph Bottum tells a too true story<\/a>:<\/p>\n

There are some real championship athletes on the rodeo circuit, and she wasn\u2019t that. But she was good enough to get a minor riding scholarship to a school off on the other side of the state, joining the rodeo team of one of those big land-grant state universities that engulf midwestern and western towns. And she lasted less than a year. Three, four, maybe five months before she dropped out and turned up at home again, pregnant.<\/p>\n

Not pretty enough to be a real target, her youth and her innocence were attractive enough to get her seduced and abandoned. She knew enough not to have an abortion\u2014the pro-life creed is almost the only one that kids get, anymore, even out in the rural areas\u2014but she didn\u2019t have the sense or the character to keep it from happening in the first place, and nobody else was looking after her. She had a single talent: She sat a horse like a dream, and she thought that the school that had recruited her because of that talent would be her ticket to education and sophistication.<\/p>\n

College let her down. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

College is letting a lot of kids down, for a lot of reasons<\/strong>. I know a bunch of kids in college, right now, some at \u201cvery good\u201d schools, some at smaller, meaner ones. None of them are particularly happy; all of them feel like they\u2019ve been sold a false ideal. Some of them feel stranded\u2013they\u2019d like to quit, but if you\u2019re going to pay the loan, you may as well have the degree, and besides, it\u2019s not like there are any jobs, outside in \u201cthe world.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not just<\/em> the colleges that have let them down. If they are so susceptible what Bottum calls \u201cbacchanalia of the contemporary American college experience,\u201d then perhaps their weaknesses were reinforced by a media-and-trend embracing society that rushes to discover the lowest common denominator of human behavior, and by parents who have thought too much of their own desires; perhaps the kids have been finding the mud to be sticky and immobilizing because the churches have chosen to teach warm-puddle \u201cspecialness\u201d over the whys and wherefores of faith, and thus foundational building blocks are being left unused.<\/p>\n

Read the whole thing, though. It will make you sad, because it is true, and it is regretful.<\/p>\n

But it is, at least, beautifully written.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joseph Bottum tells a too true story: There are some real championship athletes on the rodeo circuit, and she wasn\u2019t that. But she was good enough to get a minor riding scholarship to a school off on the other side of the state, joining the rodeo team of one of those big land-grant state universities […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,96,197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-faith","category-parenting"],"yoast_head":"\nBeautiful & Sad and all too true<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Joseph Bottum tells a too true story: There are some real championship athletes on the rodeo circuit, and she wasn\u2019t that. 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